Optical trapping and manipulation of particles in colloidal and biomedical sciences are made possible by the shaping of light. Shaped optical fields have enabled researchers to better understand the biophysics and colloidal dynamics through the trapping, guiding or patterning of molecules or nano/micro particles. Spatial engineering of focal field intensity has been studied to reach resolution far beyond diffraction limit in microscope system. Vortex beam, also known as “twisted light”, has also drawn interest owing to its spiral phase wavefront carrying orbital angular momentums. Better integrity of vortex beam through propagation in turbulent atmosphere may use orbital angular momentum as an information carrier for free space communication due to its orthogonality and multiplexing capability. Besides the manipulation of intensity and phase, as the vector nature of electromagnetic wave, the state of polarization (SOP) also plays an important role in flat top generation, focus engineering, optical tweezing and surface plasmon sensing using cylindrical vectorial beams, and spatially resolved ellipsometry. All the above applications require the spatial modulations of certain aspect of optical fields.
Versatile systems have been developed for the generation of optical fields with exotic properties. However, all existing techniques have limitations and cannot be used to generate a spatially-variant complex vectorial optical field with high spatial resolution on a pixel-by-pixel basis. Therefore, a need exists to generate a spatially-variant complex vectorial optical field with high spatial resolution on a pixel-by-pixel basis.